Hearts of Iron

Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th development diary. I’m Johan, and I got dragged into this devdiary writing thingie today because of a curse.. We have lost a few members of the team to the dreaded “holiday”-curse, including podcat & doomdark, but we hope to have them back in a wee while. In the last few months, we’ve spent quite a lot of time going through features, and redesigning those that did not improve the game significantly enough from the previous iterations of the series.

One of those features that went the way of the dodo was the goals system. The goals system did not have a visible progression, it did not have clear instructions to the player, and was constantly mixing between things happening because you selected a goal, or things you had to do to fulfill the goal. This was not acceptable for a feature in a modern PDS game, so we soaked our brains in the nectar of the gods for a while, and came up with a new system, which according to our QA team, “Is very very fun”, and also creates replayability.

Now its time for us, without further ado, to introduce the National Focus system.
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Redeeming the Third Reich (or not) in Hearts of Iron 4/IGN
”Even having only played for a couple hours, Hearts of Iron 4 is already one of those games I think about in my spare moments. Modern warfare on this scale has never been so finely modeled while still being relatively accessible and logistically forgiving.http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/...arts-of-iron-4

Hearts of Iron 4 is shaping up to make "The Good War" a great one/PCGamesN
”...it was a tremendous first act, and, considering I was managing one of the largest economies and complex war machines in the 20th century, a surprisingly elegant and intuitive experience. Hearts of Iron 4 did a great job of making sure I knew what I could do and why I might want to do it, so that I was always free to focus on figuring out exactly what I should do. And that’s exactly what a game like this is all about.http://www.pcgamesn.com/hearts-of-ir...war-made-great

Hands On: Hearts Of Iron IV - The best laid plans/Rock Paper Shotgun
"In less than an hour, I prevented World War II by screwing up the invasion of Poland so efficiently that the French army had marched into Berlin by 1938. I’d been following scripted historical goals – y’know, remilitarising the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the kind of to-do list that caused me to wince everytime I glanced at it – but had jumped the gun somewhat, declaring war before my troops were fully prepared. In the final moments, the French invasion on the Western Front was pushing my troops back faster than I could push into the East."http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015...ts-of-iron-iv/

Hi everyone, time for a smoking fresh diary! This time I am going to go through some of the things we showed in the PdxCon stream in more detail.

One of our important design goals for HOI4 is to make you feel like you are growing and nurturing your army as well as putting more focus into pre-war production. We have showed how its important to build up stockpiles of equipment for your army prior to war and get efficiency up for your production lines and we have talked about how you need to gain and spend experience to modify your divisional templates for the army. So whats left? The soft part of the division - the guys who actually does the fighting in the divisions! We wanted you to be able to affect them more as well, and have the effects be more visible.

Conscription and manpower

Manpower will see some big changes in HOI4. Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count. Conscription laws also come with trade-offs in that recruiting more will impact efficiency of your industry and as you dig deeper and starts scraping the barrel of recruits their quality will drop requiring more training time to reach the same level of proficiency. The idea is to make it less clear cut than in hoi3 where more men was always best at all times.
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So, do you want to know more about Paradox Development Studio upcoming games and expansion?
Lovely, then we are happy to say that you are in for quite treat!
This week, developers and strategy youtubers will delve deep in the games and show you all the good stuff that's coming

Question: "Are we going to see any brand new game based on the Clausewitz engine in the near future?"Answer: "Yes! First up is Hearts of Iron IV, the latest in our successful WW2 series of wargames, which will be released in Q2. We have another game in production and yet another one in pre-production."

Hey everyone! As Podcat said in the latest developer diary, we plan to release Hearts of Iron IV late Q2 2015:http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...ernal-Politics
While waiting for the game, make sure you have read all the developer diaries and watched all the livestream videos so you are prepared

Hey there all Paradoxians from wintry Sweden!
Here are our short presentations, so you can get to know us devs at Paradox Development Studio

We are the developers behind strategy franchises such as Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis: Rome and Victoria.
Presentations of most of the devs at PDS are listed below, just click the links to find out who hides behind your favourite forum nick!

Hi everyone,
we are now back from holidays and hard at work making games, so it's time for another dev diary. In this one we are going to talk about internal politics as well as give you an update on project schedule for Hearts of Iron IV.

Political Power
Political power is a new currency in Hearts of Iron IV. It models how much control you as a ruler have over things. Political power is gained over time automatically, but there are also ways of gaining more quicker, which brings us to National Goals.

National Goals
A national goal is something you set up as a promise or mission to the nation. Picking one will cost you political power, but you'll usually get it back plus more reward if you can show that you were able to accomplish it. It might be a specific historical goal (which is a great way of pointing the AI in the right direction btw) or something more lose, like a campaign of improving the nations roads.
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Make sure to listen to Three Moves Ahead podcast Episode 291: Europa Universalis IV in 2015"Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs joins Rob to talk about Europa Universalis IV. EUIV has seen several expansions and updates since its launch, and what used to be the undisputed flagship of the studio is fighting for top dog with Crusader Kings II. Sean has played just a few hours of EUIV and offers his insights into what the game has grown to be and why he keeps coming back."https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/europa-universalis-iv-in-2015
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Meet the Tanks and Vehicles of World War II in a New Developer Diary Video

STOCKHOLM — November 20, 2014 — Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio today released a new developer diary video for Hearts of Iron IV, the upcoming World War II strategy game for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. The video features a visit to the “Arsenalen” museum of military vehicles in Sweden, where Hearts of Iron IV’s Project Lead, Dan Lind, invites eager commanders to join him on a tour of how different tanks were used to turn the tide of war – and how different nations pursued tactics of quality vs. quantity.

This tour is connected to new game discussion and in-game footage as details about industry, war experience and vehicle production are revealed.

Welcome to the art portion of Hearts of iron 4(HOI4) dev diary series. This diary will focus on the visual aesthetics of the game and sexy graphic-stuff.
My name is Joakim Larsen and Im a 3D artist working with the HOI4 team on giving players of HOI4 the most visual pleasure out of the game.

Today we are happy to show some of the work we have done on the graphic side of HOI4.
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Hi everyone! It's time to start talking about how the naval aspects of the game are changing with Hearts of Iron IV. There are a lot of aspects of naval gameplay, so we will be splitting this up in several diaries. Strategic warfare and details on missions will be in later diaries. This one will focus on direct combat and the general idea.

We had a few goals when designing naval mechanics for HOI4. We wanted it to both be able to handle the case of German surface raider ships relying on firepower and speed to tie up a large portion of the royal navy with a few ships like what happened early on in the war and the massive naval battles of the pacific between Japan and USA. We also wanted different ship types to be able to interact with each other and not make, say, convoy raiding a completely separate system.

What makes naval action so different from land is that the position of everything is not precisely known. So just because you know there is a German ship in a sea zone doesn't mean you can find it before it leaves.
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Paradox Interactive's new YouTube project Paradox Extra (work in progress name) is looking to recruit fans and skilled content creators from our community. This is a new startup / pilot project spearheaded by yours truly, aiming to create more a fan-incorporating channel where we give you frequent (and repeated!) high quality content that is less market-y and more YouTube-y. Yes, very few of the things I said are real words, but hey, hopefully you still understood me!

Hello guys and gals! Most of the HOI4 team is currently on a much needed summer vacation, but we figured we couldn't just leave you hanging without a diary this month, so let's get to it *puts down beer* *cracks knuckles*.

The Air Technology tree is similar to the Armor tech tree we showed back in diary 2 in that we are focusing around chassis and unlocking specific historical equipment/models that those versed in WWII will be familiar with.
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